EA wants to reclaim FPS market, claims Battlefield 3 will be best game out this year

Electronic Arts boss John Riccitiello’s reiterated that the firm is gunning to reclaim its position as market leader in the FPS genre.

The executive noted that EA calved out what they believe was the industry’s first “mass market” FPS series in Medal of Honor, though conceded the publishing giant no longer dominates the genre as it once did.

"I've made no excuse for the reality that I want market leadership in the first-person shooter business," said Riccitiello, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. "In many ways I feel that we created the first mass market first-person shooter with Medal of Honor and unfortunately with the transition to the PS3 era we lost that. We're after it now."

"There's a great thing about an annual franchise, whether it's us or our competition; when you've got that annual franchise it's a meal ticket, it can generate a great deal of income.”

"One of the problems with an annual franchise is you don't take the time to reengineer the underlying codebase so that it's as 'next-generation' as it can be," he explained.

Despite having fallen off its pedestal as FPS market leader, Riccitiello believes the upcoming Battlefield 3 is just the ticket it needs to re-establish itself in the playing field. In fact, he went so far as to claim that the shooter will stand head and shoulders above anything else released this year.

"We think there's a window of opportunity here. We've been investing for three years to build Battlefield 3. I think it will stand up as the best product in the industry this year... and we're going dead at 'em,” he commented.

Battlefield 3 is due out on PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360 in late 2011.